Tell me if you've experienced this before: a singular scene where a character is shown at their very worst, and you see it and go "oh damn... that's me." I suspect this sentiment is quite common among those who suffer in any way from mental health issues, especially given the prevalence of a lot of mental health tropes as a part of story telling. But for the more serious conditions, it's quite rare to find a sympathetic and realistic portrayal of what it actually is like to live under those conditions. Characters that come to mind for me, personally, would be Bojack Horseman from, well, Bojack Horseman; Evan Hansen from, uh, Dear Evan Hansen; and Harley Quinn, in particular from her animated series because in almost every other media that strongly features her her borderline personality disorder seems to be fetishized into the "manic pixie dream girl" trope with a dash of "psycho babe <3" thrown in. With particular respect to this whole thing about seeing yourself in a fictional character, and the kind of help it can be to people in terms of self-understanding to see somebody who is like them in fictional media, I find this video by Curio to be the best at explaining that.
The reason I bring this up is because it's one of the biggest reasons I love Banana Fish. I've watched it before, and connected to it before, and written about it before, but I never quite managed to put my finger on the connection I drew to the show. I tried in that previous article, but I don't think that the ideas really cut as deeply as they do with more information. If you've read the previous one, you can kind of think of this as a supplementary deeper dive of that, but if you haven't this article itself should cut it. I generally just assumed that it was the fact that I like seeing boys kiss or snuggle up to each other, I like literature, and Banana Fish is an incredibly human tale which makes copious references to the list of Great American Novels. But it runs much deeper than that, and most of it can be traced to a single scene. Throughout the show, Ash Lynx suffers through intense ordeals and trauma, and it's made clear that this is only a short snippet of the horrors he's had to live with for basically the entirety of his life. He is sexually assaulted by the mercenary Colonel Eduardo Foxx during the process of his capture. His friends manage to save him, but he is so shaken that he is unable to even stand human touch. Cain Blood attempts to look over his wounds, but Ash slaps him away on reflex. Nobody is allowed within the vicinity of the injured Lynx. Nobody, except Okumura Eiji.
On first glance, the sheer amount of tragedy that befalls Ash Lynx in his childhood and adolescence can only be described as "too much". Repeatedly sexually assaulted by an adult man in the small town he grew up in and forced to defend himself as a small child; being all but abandoned by his family who have no idea how to handle this ordeal; being kidnapped by a mafia when he runs away from home and forced into child sex slavery. It's not quite hard to see exactly why Ash is so damaged, but harder still to see how Ash has grown into who he is in the show. Ash has Mary Sue-levels of intelligence, is dangerously elegant, and intensely charismatic, if a little bit cold. I want to deal with this because this, to me, is the key to unlocking the ultimate demise of Ash Lynx.
In 2016, three academics at the Dornsife School of Public Health in the Drexel University published a content analysis study on all articles that mention Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the New York Times (NYT) between 1980 and 2015. The purpose of this study was to triangulate the level of public awareness of what trauma entails, as a pillar in the fight against PTSD as a public health issue. The study concluded a few things: firstly, that media coverage of PTSD had broadly increased from 1980 to 2015, with 2 NYT articles in 1980 and 70 in 2014. Secondly, the vast majority (50.6%) of articles on PTSD focused on veterans and other members of the military, with combat-related trauma making up most of that (38% in total). Thirdly, there seems to be overwhelmingly negative or misguided coverage of PTSD-related issues. A third of articles spoke specifically about the common PTSD tropes of nightmares, depressions, and flashbacks. A sixth covered court cases in which the defendant/alleged perpetrator suffered from PTSD. Finally, articles identifying treatment options for PTSD declined in relative frequency over time, from 19.4% between 1980-1995 to a staggeringly low 5.7% between 2005-2015.
In the hit detective game L.A. Noire by Rockstar Studios (more famous for the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises), you play the role of Cole Phelps, a veteran of the Pacific War in the US Marine Corps who returns to Los Angeles and begins his career in policing. The tone and environment of the game is a very strong callback to the noir film genre (it's right there in the name), and you follow Phelps' meteoric rise in the LAPD as a detective investigating cases. As the player, you get to solve these cases, interrogate suspects and witnesses, engage in police shootouts, all that fun stuff. But the real concerning meat of the game lies in the overarching narrative that only begins to truly unfold after your partner double-crosses you and you get demoted to the Arson desk. The moral conflict of the game revolves around Phelps' wartime subordinate Ira Hogeboom, who was a flamethrower operator during the Pacific War. Haunted by the memory of having burned out a cave of wounded civilians and children, Hogeboom is manipulated by a real estate syndicate into burning down peoples' homes as a threat. The story of Hogeboom is, in essence, the classic PTSD story: a war veteran inadvertently commits horrific war crimes against children, whose screams haunt him in his dreams and who is unable to control his actions as a fractured individual. Phelps eventually shoots Hogeboom, to put him out of his misery.
From this, we can generally construct the public perception of what trauma and its effects are like. The traumatized individual is a potential danger, but not as a fault of their own. They are unable to help themselves from recreating the scenes of destruction and terror that float about in their head. They have absolutely no control over their actions. They suffer from constant nightmares, and are typically found in a depressive state. It is little wonder, then, that a 2010 survey found 46% of employers citing PTSD as a barrier from hiring veterans.
Ash Lynx is decidedly not most of these things. He is always superbly in control, terrifyingly in control even; he knows how to use his sexual appeal to entice other men into making mistakes. He stands strong against everything the show has to throw at him. Throughout the entirety of Banana Fish, his relationship with Eiji is completely asexual in nature. Some have questioned whether Banana Fish is an actual entry into the boys' love genre because there is no sexual relationship between Ash and Eiji whatsoever. While Ash suffers from occasional bouts of nightmares, he is always generally lucid and sanguine when awake, and is always so task-oriented that it's difficult to even tell if he really has emotions for the vast majority of the cast and the audience most of the time. If we go by the common perception of what trauma is, we can see that while Ash has suffered from traumatic experiences, who he is as a person and the way he behaves jars greatly with how people tend to understand PTSD.
The key to understanding Ash's PTSD and its representations lies in his troubled relationship with Eiji. Attachment theory, outlined by John Bowlby in his 3-volume work Attachment and Loss in 1969, is a good tool to analyze this relationship. Bowlby studies the attachment behavior between children and their mothers as catalysts for their relational behaviors well into adulthood. Bowlby outlines 4 standard categories of attachment behavior that surface in adulthood, that can be traced to different childhood circumstances, and applies them along two axes modeling the individual's model of their self and their model of others. The "normal" behavior is known as secure attachment. Children become securely attached to their parents when they are sure that their parent or caregiver is sensitive and responsive to their needs. Children who grow up securely attached, with caring parents who provide a sense of safety, tend to be more independent, have higher self-esteem, and report fewer instances of mental health issues. These individuals, naturally, have a positive self-image, and are secure in others. If a child has a positive self-image but is insecure in others, they tend towards dismissive-avoidant attachment. A dismissive-avoidant child is caused by a consistent unresponsiveness of the caregiver to their needs. Essentially, the child learns that emotional messaging and attachment behavior is entirely ineffective in fulfilling their needs, and sort of gives up on human attachment. This means that they avoid intimacy into adulthood, and behave generally distantly. If a child has a negative self-image but seeks others out, they exhibit anxious-ambivalent attachment. Anxious-ambivalent children exhibit high levels of insecurity, and are extremely dependent on others for validation and self-worth. Research shows that this style of attachment is common among those who experience emotional abuse in childhood and in relationships that diminish affected individuals' self worth. They grow up to be defensive, but ultimately reliant upon their close relationships. This would probably apply to the yandere trope in anime quite well.
What happens, however, when a child experiences both low self-esteem and has no confidence in others to be able to fulfil their needs? This is called disorganized attachment, and has been experiencing a growing interest from researchers in terms of how it correlates to other mental health conditions - which is good for this article, because it directly correlates to the kind of childhood trauma which Ash experiences. Comorbidity in psychology is a complex web, and a game of trying to pin down exactly which condition is the first mover in an individual's system. Being the most problematic attachment style, however, it is fortunate that this is experienced by a minority of individuals. Disorganized attachment is the result of a chaotically abusive primary caregiver, where the parents are themselves the terror which is inflicted upon the child. There is a double bind that occurs when parents fulfil the biological need for attachment yet enact cruel abuse on their child completely at random, and with no predictability for the child. Researchers observe that children who are in this situation tend to be constantly on survival mode, constantly feeling out the emotional availability of their caretaker in a desperate bid to gauge and predict whether the next interaction will result in the fulfilment of needs or yet another stressful situation. This is how trauma tends to pass on from parents to children, in fact; most of the parents of children identified with disorganized attachment are unable to meet their child's emotional needs because of their own emotional unavailability.
I'll be quite clear and honest: I personally suffer from disorganized attachment disorder. I grew up in an abusive household. My biological father was the most identifiable abuser, since he would come home drunk almost nightly and violently assault my mother. However, the gift that he bestowed upon me was not disorganized attachment, but rather a deep sense of androphobia and mistrust of men that has only been exacerbated through bad interactions with men that persists to this day. No, the disorganized attachment was a gift to me from my mother. Life was difficult for the both of us; she lived trapped in a household as a result of a bad decision to marry a bad man, with a young child who was entirely dependent on her. She had grown up with her own history of childhood abuse, and now was thrust into motherhood. In a sense, she needed me just as much as I needed her, if not more. This meant that she invested all her energy into my development and ensuring that I grew up to be a successful person. I don't doubt that she did her best, and many of the stories are far too personal to relate on a public platform like this, but suffice it to say that life at that age was a nightmare for me. I could never be sure whether anything I was going to do would make her happy or lead to me getting caned that night. I was unable to, and still am unable to, relate my emotional life to her because I have no idea whether that will end really well or in a complete flaming dumpster fire disaster.
The exact provenance of Ash's disorganized attachment should be traced back to his relationship with his estranged father. When his father finds out that his son has been sexually abused, well... I don't really know how to put profoundly how messed up this scene is into words so I'll let this clip do the talking for me.
We can try to look at the effect this had on Ash through his response, his primary caregiver's response, and what happens afterwards. It is noted in this scene that Ash stares, wide-eyed, at the adults who are discussing what happened. This is, unfortunately, quite standard for children who develop disorganized attachment. Researchers note that these children tend to have a "freeze" reaction, along with other reactions to their caregivers that indicate fear, although they continue to seek comfort from them. A lot of gaps exist in the story of Ash's childhood told by his father that must be filled, but ultimately we see that Ash is unable to find final solace in his father, who in exasperation gives up on trying to help his son, to the extent that a child must take matters into his own hands. Soon after, Ash goes to live with his aunt when his older brother is deployed to Iraq, and runs away from home, eventually ending up in a vicious cycle of sexual abuse as one of Dino Golzine's captives. I'm no expert, but going off my own bad experiences with men, I would say that having this sort of experiences with men for the entirety of your life ever since you were seven years old would not only deeply affect your own trust in men, but also how you relate to sexuality. This explanation for the extremely asexual nature of Ash's relationship with Eiji is rather straightforward, and there's more to dwell on.
A 2006 paper by Barbara Kuerer Gangi explores how disorganized attachment resulting from abusive childhood trauma leads to problematic romantic relationships in adulthood using 3 case studies. In particular, the cases exhibit a fluidity between hostility and helplessness strategies in relating to intimate partners. Naturally, they're all personal attacks to me and my own behavior in relationships, but I'll put one of the examples here to illustrate.
"Kate and Samuels' relationship also demonstrated the hostile or controlling and helpless or submissive strategies of disorganized couple dynamics. In their relationship the hostile and helpless roles fluctuated between them; one or the other would take either role.
I could not figure out the icky, disgusted, 'I want to be out of here' feeling I had with a couple that came to talk about their 10-year-old son. They were handsome, with movie star good looks. Yet I did not find them attractive. The best I could decipher of my countertransference was the sense that Kate had a "Stepford wife" feel to her. She rarely moved while she sat and was exceedingly compliant with her husband. After we focused on the presenting problem, Samuel wanted to talk about his wife's inhibition in oral sex. He demeaned Kate's interest in intercourse and described with rapture how he enjoyed "going down on her" and how "uptight" she could be. It was his opinion, forcibly expressed, that he knew the correct way to sexually engage and that his wife's preferences were less than adequate. Kate submissively and sweetly agreed that she was not sufficiently spontaneous in oral sex. Samuel's dominance and Kate's submission were dramatically substantiated when later, I learned that at Samuel's request, Kate had had plastic surgery on what they both described as her 'unfeminine vulva'. In a still later session, Samuel, in great pain, disclosed that 'it killed him' that Kate had had two affairs in the last year. The hostile or controlling and helpless or passive dynamic persisted in this relationship, although now the roles had changed.
Their very difficult childhood experiences helped illuminate their hostile or controlling and helpless or passive pattern. Kates doll-like deadness began early in life with a perfectionist, controlling, and abusive backstage father. Samuel, with numerous scars remaining on his body, had frequent encounters with violent at his brutal father s hands. Now, as adults currently in a family together, struggled against knowing yet enacted the annihilation fears they experienced in their original family." (Gangi, 2006)
While Banana Fish mainly operates as a chronicle of Ash and his fight against those who abuse him, and so spends a lot of time focusing on him and Eiji apart but struggling to find their way back together, there are small pockets in time where they both are in a state of relative domestic bliss. It's quite cute to see the both of them together, but at the same time their interactions when living together must be understood through the lens of Ash's disorganized attachment. There are two main features of their interaction that we, as the audience, find endearing. Firstly, that Eiji is the only individual who has ever truly been allowed into Ash's personal orbit. The other members of the gang are horrified when Eiji moves over to wake up Ash, and are stunned when their gang boss wakes up in a state of docility. Ash needs Eiji, and this is clear to see in every single interaction between them living in the Manhattan condominium. The second feature occurring underneath all this is that Ash is attempting to push Eiji away, ostensibly for two reasons. Ash wants to protect Eiji from the dark, messy world which he inhabits, and at the same time doesn't want Eiji to see him as an operative of this underworld. To Ash, Eiji as an enduring source of comfort stems not just from Eiji's purity, but also his perception of Ash. No matter how much Ash talks to Eiji about his trauma of having had to kill people to rise above his station in the criminal underworld, and no matter how much Eiji sincerely proclaims and exhibits his acceptance of Ash regardless of this fact, Ash cannot but be afraid that Eiji's mind will change if he sees what Ash gets up to. Thus, he pushes, and he pulls. Ash draws Eiji ever closer by his side with the excuse that Eiji is most safe with him, and pushes him away with the excuse that Eiji is most in danger by his side. Eiji as a character never really wavers at all in how he treats Ash; it is only in Ash's mind, where he is reliant on Eiji yet at the same time insecure about Eiji's attitude towards him.
I talked before about comorbidities between mental health conditions being common in individuals who experience trauma. In the aftermath of the 1999 Izmit earthquake in Turkey, it was found that 87.5% of individuals with PTSD experienced comorbidity with other mental health conditions, chief among which was major depressive disorder (MDD) (Yildiz & Göker, 2004). Thus far, we've talked about the disorganized attachment disorder which is comorbid with Ash's PTSD and explored it through Eiji's relationship with him, but not really explored his PTSD in and of itself yet. The most distinctive feature of Ash's PTSD is not the loss of agency nor the discontinuity in temporal experience, but instead how he is seemingly permanently locked into a "survival mode". Julian Ford connects PTSD with the part of our brains that, when triggered, cause us to be hyper-vigilant and be stuck in a fight-or-flight state. Every other function of the brain that is not essential to the immediate survival of the individual is shut down. The slightest suggestion of threat triggers an overblown response to individuals with PTSD, only because their alarms are almost permanently on. When you see Ash use his spider-sense and cat-like agility in almost all situations, you should be aware that this is him in survival mode. In fact, the only time he ever switches it off is whenever Eiji is involved - and because he lives such a wretched life, that's always whenever bad things happen, and this perpetuates his inability to switch it off.
This is, in fact, one of the greatest reasons I find the ending of Banana Fish to be as tragic as it is. The sort of mentality that it requires to survive in Ash's position is one that is at the same time extremely unhealthy, and the sort of bond which Ash forges with Eiji is critical to his own recovery and the rediscovery of the existence of a life beyond the violent, wretched one that is all he knows. The death of Ash speaks to the greatest truths of therapy as pertains to trauma: healing cannot begin while you are still entrenched within a lifestyle that caused those experiences to begin with, and that healing cannot erase the damage that you inflict on others as well, even if you inflicted that damage while you were not in control of yourself. The cycles of violence in Banana Fish do not end with the death of Ash, and will never end. Is it enough that Ash found this small moment of solace from the world before it took him? Or, more importantly, what ultimately killed Ash?
Let me try and trace the causal chain of events leading to him being shot. Ash was shot as a result of a desire by Lao to take revenge for Ash's killing of the boss of the Chinese street gang, and Ash's best friend, Shorter Wang. In fact, one of the major conflicts of the second half of the show is the Chinese street gang grappling with Ash's killing of Shorter. The truth is, however, that none of it was Ash's fault. He shot Shorter in an effort to protect Eiji, since Shorter had been injected with the Banana Fish serum and had gone feral. He refuses to tell anybody why he shot Shorter Wang, even as the new boss, Sing Soo-Ling, constantly attempts to try and get an answer for him in order to placate the gang. Yet, Ash's silence on this remains unbroken throughout the rest of the show. Shorter is an unspeakable topic around him, and he snaps at anyone who tries to bring Shorter up, and you can tell it isn't simply because mere knowledge of Banana Fish has been deemed to be dangerous for the individual. It's conclusive that Ash was killed by his silence, and this is important because research indicates that traumatic experiences affect an individual's ability to communicate. It's quite telling that Ash never brings Shorter up - he never brings up any of his past to anyone unless absolutely necessary to complete the task at hand, and even then is unable to personally reckon with it. This is in itself a natural consequence of PTSD, since one cannot explain to others what one cannot themselves process; to (mis)quote the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." The very symptom of his trauma, in other words, denied him the chance to recover and live a new life.
I would argue that the fact that Ash was killed by his silence makes him a tragic hero in the Greek fashion, and that is why we feel so much for him. Do not be confused by the name - a Greek tragic hero is not meant to be seen as a role model, or to be emulated. One is not a tragic hero; rather, one becomes a tragic hero through their misguided actions. "Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear or pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design." The tragic hero is thus ensnared by the greatness which the work places upon them. Just as Oedipus swept into Thebes after unwittingly killing his father and unknowingly beds his mother after saving the city from a crisis, so too is must Ash kill one of his closest friends in order to save everyone. Just as Oedipus sought out the truth of Thebes' famine because of his strength as a leader and belief in truth, so too is Ash unable to relate to anyone else the circumstances of Shorter's death. And just as Oedipus eventually blinded and exiled himself upon discovering the truth of his misdeeds, so too does Ash lay bleeding in a library as a result of the distance he must maintain from others.
Banana Fish is a complex work that stands the test of time. After all, it was first serialized in 1985, and the story itself only ended in 1994. A lot of the themes in the story don't change very much, sometimes by nature of the fact that the US itself doesn't change very much - there isn't that big of a change, for example, in changing Griffin's veteran experiences to have occurred in the Gulf Wars rather than in the Vietnam War. Neither has society become so much less dark that the horrors shown are entirely removed from memory. After all, while the 2019 arrest of Jeffrey Epstein was not the first time he had been convicted of sexual crimes related to minors, what marked it was the extensive connections which he had with the rest of the political and business class, which is probably what led to his demise (unless you believe he did actually kill himself, in which case you can ignore this section). The themes of the inescapable cycle of trauma, while being something I previously touched upon, connect Banana Fish to the work that inspired its name on a far greater level than I initially expected, and sometimes it feels like I take different lessons away from this show depending on the stage of life I watch it at.
Every time I watch this ending, I invariably cry. You'd be a monster if you didn't at least feel terrible for Ash and his demise. That is, after all, what I believe the creators of the story intended with this particular ending. While happy endings are usually preferable among audiences, once in a while a good creator knows how to create a meaningful, terrible ending to a story. In fact, I'm quite different from most in that I tend to prefer creators who know how to do this instead of simply copping out with happily-ever-after endings when the meaning of the story would be much better served if it was framed as a cautionary tale. Creating believable and empathetic levels of trauma and sadness, however, seems to be almost an art form given how difficult it is for many creators these days to do. This is why tomorrow I'll mainly be talking about really, really bad representations of trauma in anime, in particular in what I like to call the postmodern magical girl genre. I feel like in order to recognize good portrayals of complex issues like trauma and its effects in anime, it's important to recognize the bad ones, and this genre has been a pet peeve of mine for a while, so do let me indulge myself.
References
Bowlby, John. Attachment. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Attachment and Loss. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1982.
Gangi, Barbara Kuerer. “Disorganized Attachment Dynamics in Couples.” Group 30, no. 2 (2006): 153–62.
Lahousen, Theresa, Human Friedrich Unterrainer, and Hans-Peter Kapfhammer. “Psychobiology of Attachment and Trauma—Some General Remarks From a Clinical Perspective.” Hypothesis and Theory 10, no. 914 (2019). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00914.
Monson, Candice M., Steffany J. Fredman, Alexandra Macdonald, Nicole D. Pukay-Martin, Patricia A. Resick, and Paula P. Schnurr. “Effect of Cognitive-Behavioral Couple Therapy for PTSD.” JAMA 308, no. 7 (August 15, 2012): 700–709. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.9307.
Purtle, Jonathan, Katherine Lynn, and Mashal Malik. “‘Calculating the Toll of Trauma’ in the Headlines: Portrayals of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the New York Times (1980–2015).” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 86, no. 6 (2016): 632–38. https://doi.org/10.1037/ort0000187.
Rholes, W. Steven, Ramona L. Paetzold, and Jamie L. Kohn. “Disorganized Attachment Mediates the Link from Early Trauma to Externalizing Behavior in Adult Relationships.” Personality and Individual Differences 90 (February 2016): 61–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.10.043.
Yildiz, Mustafa, and Meltem Naz Kuruoğlu Göker. “Psychiatric Comorbidity in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Among People Seeking Treatment After the Marmara Earthquake.” International Journal of Mental Health 33, no. 1 (2004): 59–66.